Although the number of emergency transportations has been increased recently, there is a declining trend of the number of designated emergency hospitals. This lengthens the time required to select hospitals during emergency transportation, and the measures to correct the situation have been requested. Patent Literature 1, for example, describes an emergency support system including a computer terminal carried by an emergency medical staff and a main server. When the emergencymedical staff inputs the symptoms of the emergency patient with the computer terminal and transmits the data to the main server, then the main server selects a hospital that can accept the patient based on the received symptoms of the emergency patient and information on the designated emergency hospitals, and notifies the computer terminal about the hospital, so as to transport the patient quickly. Patent Literature 2 describes another emergency support system that provides an application for primary care about emergency case that is installed beforehand in a smartphone owned by an injured or ill person. At the onset of the symptom, information on the patient is transmitted to the medical institution via network by means of a camera and a microphone of the smartphone, whereby a doctor can inspect the patient until the ambulance arrives to the site.
As one of the reasons for the increasing tendency of the number of requests for emergency transportation, an injured or ill person or their family cannot determine the emergency degree of the symptoms. The emergency support systems described in Patent Literatures 1 and 2 are for rapid emergency medical care of a patient using a mobile terminal. They are not intended to support the emergency determination on the symptoms by an injured or ill person or their family.
Medical algorithm to determine the emergency degree of an injured or ill person has been typically used by medical institutions. For instance, in Canada, they have developed and operated a system to determine (triage) the emergency degree of outpatients at hospital, named CTAS (Canadian Triage & Acuity Scale) since 1998. Based on this CTAS, the system in the Japanese version named JTAS (Japan Triage & Acuity Scale) also has been developed and operated in Japan.
Non-Patent Literature 1 shows that they developed an application named ORION (Osaka emergency information Research Intelligent Operation Network system) to search for hospitals based on the practice standard of transportation. This literature describes a system to allow emergency medical staffs to reflect the details of the transportation to hospitals on the application using their smartphones to support the selection of a suitable hospital depending on the situation.